Work affords systematic exercise for the mind, and a mind to be healthy needs exercise as much as the body does. Why is it, then, that if work is indispensable to our bodily welfare from a health point of view we all look forward so eagerly to the time when we can retire and leave it behind us? Yet that seems to be the goal towards which we are most of us striving. And it is an aimless one, unless a man has some pursuit by means of which he can use and enjoy his years of leisure, some absorbing hobby or public work of one sort or other. It is the man who has applied himself so closely to his business or profession as to have deadened his interest in other matters, who finds retirement such a deadly dull affair.
It is often said that a man does his best work before he is forty. The cry is for young men in every branch of employment, and those who have reached middle age stand a poor chance if they are so unfortunate as to lose their situations. Yet their experience ought to make them more useful and indispensable than at any previous stage in their career. A man of fifty-five complained to me some years ago that he was being put on the shelf on account of his age. “Yet I am better fitted to do my work than I have ever been,” he said.
It is quite true that he was better fitted for it from the point of view of experience and judgment. Yet he was a confirmed dyspeptic, and was always taking cold, necessitating frequent absences from his work, which was a responsible one. And it is just on this very account that there is a demand for younger and stronger men to-day. Employers prefer a man who is warranted to turn up when he is wanted, rather than a more experienced one who is liable to be at home indisposed at the very time when his services are most urgently needed. They say quite rightly, “We cannot afford to have a man who is in danger of breaking down.”
Most of the breakdowns that we meet with are put down to work or overwork. It is, therefore, looking at the matter from the personal point of view, a burning question as to how work can be carried out without bringing in its train this much-dreaded climax. In other words, “How to work and be healthy.”
It is folly to go blindly on, as so many do, hoping for the best, and taking no steps to make sure of it. It is not work, but the conditions under which it is done, that accounts for the loss of health which so often accompanies it. And much of this loss, and most of the breakdowns which occur as a result of it, may be avoided by a careful, practical study of the whole question.